Category: Into the Pit

I’ve been writing live reviews as far back as I’ve been writing about music – indeed my very first was covering downset. for ROAR (the King’s College London Student Newspaper) back in Autumn 1996.

The live reviews here go back to about 2003, and while most were first posted here, some others appeared in the (short-lived) Alternative Magazine, others on Black Harvest, Connexion Bizarre and even once on the BBC website. This archive is every live review I’ve written between 2003 and the present day.

The title of this section comes from a track on Testament’s album The New Order.

In some respects, it can’t be easy being Andrew Eldritch. But then, is there any other artist who has tried so hard to bury his own legacy? Back in the eighties, they were one of the Gothic Rock titans, releasing three wildly successful albums, having a major label deal and the power to pull in […]

After an epic holiday in Chicago – ostensibly to do Cold Waves and catch up with old friends – last year (review in the box), there wasn’t ever really any question that we wouldn’t make it back to Chicago again – and so a year on, here we were once again, in blazing September sunshine […]

This week, within four days, I’ve seen two bands live that very much rely on the visual as much as the audio. One is a fiercely political industrial project taking it’s first steps into the live arena, the other is a band dedicated to meshing old informational and propaganda videos with taut post-punk rhythms, and […]

In the annals of crazy plans by me, this one was up there with Festival Kinetik 4.0 in 2011, where my friend Tim and I headed to Ottawa and then Montreal for a heavy, heavy week of music, drinking and sightseeing. Doing Cold Waves III came up from similar origins – a lineup too good […]

A sign I’m clearly getting old – this was my fourteenth Infest. God, time flies. This year was perhaps a bit special for a number of reasons, though, at least partly down to the fact that this edition very nearly didn’t happen, and in the event it is a damned good thing that it did […]

A first for me, in attending Bloodstock for the first time, and a first time in fifteen years camping at a festival (I last did so in 1999 for Reading – you know, back when they still booked bands worth seeing). It wasn’t my first festival where the rain was torrential, though, but even so […]

Christ, 2014 is passing by in a flash. With Easter so late this year, it has resulted too in Resistanz and Whitby being on back-to-back weekends, which has left a number of us fearing for our livers during April, never mind an attempt to get any sleep. As I write this, the first of those […]

After a bit of a slow start to the year gig-wise, into February and all of a sudden there is a short spell of a number of gigs. Time constraints and other distractions have meant I've struggled to finish full reviews, so here is a roundup of the gigs I attended during February.

Every year I seem to be starting my live gig attendance that little bit later. Last year I began with easily the best show of 2013 in mid-January, with a trip to Germany to see Kraftwerk, and this year we are into the last week of January before I attend a show. And this time, […]

After a period with only one gig in a month, this was a return to gigging again, the first of ten shows or so between now and Christmas. And for this one, it was my first ever visit to Alexandra Palace for a gig (somewhere I’ve always wanted to visit), and while well organised – […]

The Lexington is one of those gig venues that I’m seeming to revisit more and more. This is a good thing – a good-sized venue, great acoustics, good booze, and it’s easy to get to. Not to mention a habit of putting on great bands time and again. Although judging on the few questions I […]

For this night, back to the Buffalo Bar for Guided Missile's latest presentation, with some familiar music and one band new to me, and offering proof once again that the North London live music scene could be seen as in rude health.

The years haven’t been especially kind to bands that came to popular attention from the nineties industrial rock boom in many ways, with few bands surviving the late-90s as the bubble burst – either they fell victim to alcohol and drugs, the mass of record label consolidations at the end of the decade, volatile inter-band […]

It has been noted recently that there have been a dearth of “club” shows in the industrial scene, at least in the UK, of late, with pretty grim predictions for 2014, too. But in the meantime, there have been the odd show to restore faith somewhat that strong bills can occur, with support acts as […]

For the tenth time – I started writing a seemingly ever-expanding review of the annual festival in 2003 – here goes with my coverage of Infest rundown for 2013. As usual this is mainly covering each of the bands in turn from my point-of-view, with a few other opinions as we go, and I’m well […]

The height of summer, in this kinda dead period between all the festivals, is always a strange time to go to gigs. For a start, it is broad daylight still before you even get to the venue, and often all-too-many venues get rather hot and sweaty early on, meaning that perhaps, gig attendance in this […]

I will, I promise, be covering another new band at some point in my reviews, rather than another returning. Although in Senser’s case, it is more a case of continuing to plug away, with a fifth album over a near-twenty year period, even if there have been downtimes and lineup changes along the way.

2013 has been a mightily odd year for music. While we’ve seen, for better or worse, no end of bands returning after long breaks, reforming or just keeping on going – with a seeming lack of new bands in certain areas – it has been quite astounding just how good many of those returns have […]

The height of summer, in this kinda dead period between all the festivals, is always a strange time to go to gigs. For a start, it is broad daylight still before you even get to the venue, and often all-too-many venues get rather hot and sweaty early on, meaning that perhaps, gig attendance in this […]